11 feb 24, Sunday
The ordination yesterday was of course a joyous occasion for the community as well as for the ordinand, Rippon. It was also a bit of a clash of cultures. The local bishop, Savarimurthu Arokiaraj, even though he himself retreated here years ago and knew Fr. Bede, has made it known that he did not approve of sitting on the ground, I suppose both for the assembly as well as for the presider, as we do here at the ashram. So a special altar was erected just for the day and a load of red and blue plastic chairs were brought in. And then I started seeing one at a time many of our monks show up not wearing the kavi robes but the white Camaldolese habit instead. Of course, our Prior General Matteo and Marino, his assistant, were here too and up to this point they had been wearing comfortable street clothes for prayers, both of them hesitant to take the risk on wearing a dhoti (I recounted to Marino that I understood this fear: the first time I was here I tied mine up with a belt), though Matteo did wear a kavi shirt. But now they too of course were in full habit and cowl, with a chasuble to be put on over that. I was feeling somewhat underdressed. Not only do I not have any of the habit with me (not even the cowl––I wasn’t expecting to need it here), but the kavi dhoti I have has got stains in it and little holes from wear and tear, and my jippa is a little too small for me. So I was feeling like a bit of a ragamuffin. Jeremias was also in kavi, but he always looks sharp.
As Jeremias and I were sitting in the chapel waiting for the service to begin, we were approached by one of the young monks and told very sternly that we had to go and vest up with a chasuble and stole because “this bishop wants all priests to be vested.” Now, that seemed to me to be kind of absurd––putting an ornate (Indian style) silky chasuble over a beat up dhoti. Still we dutifully went out to try to obey, but after a moment we both decided not to vest after all, especially as we saw a few other monks clothed only in kavi come in and sit in the back. There’s the weird clash: some of Indian Catholics do not like or are suspicious of the adaptation to Indian (which they see as “Hindu”) customs. So Dorathick did his best to adapt everything to what he thought the bishop would approve of for this ordination.
The procession began with our young guys belting out a popular Tamil hymn, every one of them with their own microphone (in that little church!) accompanied by a simply professed named Johnson on a keyboard complete with its own drum machine. It was very loud. There was a whole line of priests, vested properly, followed by the bishop who, as he came in, was slowly blessing everyone to his left and right as he made his way to the temporary altar. High church bishop meets “popular” music meets monks in kavi robes meets plastic chairs. I was wondering what Matteo was making of all this, he who is such a fine liturgist, so much so that he arranges liturgies for the Vatican. And I wondered how often something like that plays out around the world. At New Camaldoli ordinations have not been so hard to accommodate to our style of liturgy, just the Roman Rite stripped down to its basics, but I have to believe with an open-minded bishop the same could have been done here.
The whole liturgy lasted almost two and a half hours, including the photo-taking at the end. One of the guys from Kerala told me that there ordinations take at least four hours, but of course that’s a different rite. I sang one song with the guitar during the laying on of hands, oddly enough something I wrote years ago and have never sung anywhere before, a setting of Psalm 110––“You are a priest forever.” I had to scrape my memory to come up with the verses and wrote them down on a scrap of paper that I balanced on my knee. And then I led a bhajan at communion time as well, which everyone joined in on. But I was feeling a little conspicuous by this time, as if I were a Westerner “going native.”
The other little clash I was thinking of was Bede and Abhishiktananda’s vision of Christian monasticism/sannyasa as compared with institutional monasticism. (The abbot of Asirvanam was there as well.) They really did want to get back to “monk as renunciate,” and Bede was clear, as we Camaldolese are very clear, that priesthood is a different vocation than monk. If anything, they saw the sannyasi as going beyond ritual. They both still participated ‘til the end but in a much stripped-down sort of way. I found a copy of Jesu Rajan’s book Bede Griffiths and Sannyasi in the library and went immediately to one section on that, part of the long interview with Bede in the appendix.
For a priest his primary duty is his ministry and service. Once you become a sannyāsin your primary call is for prayer, meditation and seeking God alone and everything else is secondary. Everything else has to flow from that. Even in Hinduism the priest is not a sannyasin. They are quite different. … If we mix up the priesthood with sannyasa we lose the contemplative dimension which is the essence of sannyasa.
Sorry if that sounds too critical––I’m trying to be objective. I know that there are few who have the skill set or background to hold all these things together. Again I was remembering an experience at Tiruvanamalai years ago, with the Brahmin priests performing their rituals and chanting the Vedas and very conspicuous in the distinctive dhotis, bodily markings and jewelry, and then the kavi clad sannyasis sitting in the back, watching, silently.
At any rate we had a wonderful lunch celebration afterward. The women in the kitchen had been working since the wee hours of the morning to prepare for it. There was a serving line and it seemed like it was all-hands-on-deck with the staff feeding all the invited guests. Rippon had quite a few members of his family, young and old, staying here––they had traveled three days on the train! And of course there was the whole retinue of local priests and some of Rippon’s faculty and classmates. All in all, it was probably a more subdued affair than usual ordinations, but Rippon left with his family now for more celebrations in his hometown.
It was a bit of a letdown already by evening prayer and the evening meal that night, so many had already left. But this morning it was quite a crash: the young guys left to go back to school early this morning and the Italians left last night to go home on the redeye via Dubai, and several monks were missing for various reasons. By midday prayer and lunch, we were so few that we had lunch self-service.
Again, I am here with nothing to do, so now I will switch into retreat mode––whatever that will look like––for the next few weeks.
Monday 12 feb
I’m reading a 700 plus page novel called The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese (I read his Cutting for Stone some years ago and really enjoyed it). It takes place in South India. I just read a passage about a Causcasian doctor named Digby who has been transferred to Tamil Nadu. This paragraph (page 105) suited me perfectly.
If Digby had anyone at home to write to, he might catalog these morning sights, described the small framed handsome Tamils with their sharp Roman features, bright glittering eyes, and ready smiles. Next to them he feels pale, blotchy, and much too vulnerable to the sun.
I laughed out loud. Not to mention stiff and mushy! I’m in generally pretty good shape, thanks be to God and regular exercise and yoga. But, as I always say, I find that India is tough on the body, at least life in the ashram. I’m used to sitting on the floor a lot at home, but not this much! Two hours of meditation, once in the morning and once in the evening, plus the prayer and all the meals. And on hard hard granite or cement floors, not my cushy zabutan or the faux-Persian rug in my cell. That in addition to the many hours on the plane and in cars the last week, I feel as stiff as a board. So per forza I need to stretch first thing every morning before I head to chapel for morning meditation. I was reminded of one of those early foundational lessons I learned studying yoga and that I always try to pass on, especially to skeptical Christians: we do these asanas so that we can sit in meditation longer, pure and simple. They are not ends nor even goals; they’re a means to that goal and the end is realizing the indwelling Divine for which we must be very, very still. “God always speaks his word in eternal silence and in silence it must be heard.”
I don’t remember it being emphasized as a communal practice to much in past visits, but Dorathick faithfully observes the 5:30-6:30 PM meditation, beginning with nama japa and the evening one from 6 to 7 PM. Few other monks come for it except for the formation guys, but Jeremias and I have been going whenever possible. There truly is something powerful about the commitment to a common practice like that, instead of relying on my own personal practice for which it’s too easy to cut corners.
It's Monday now, almost Lent. It will be interesting to make this my Lenten retreat here in this desert. I do not think there will be any Mardi Gras festivities tomorrow. Dorathick, at Jeremias’ request (insistence), is taking us to a Hindu temple today where we are to climb over 1000 steps. Sounds more like the beginning of a Lenten penitential practice than a Fat Tuesday party. I’ve already stated that I am not going to attempt it wearing a dhoti…
